Ascott, MJ, Christelis, V, Lapworth, DJ et al. (7 more authors) (2023) On the application of rainfall projections from a convection-permitting climate model to lumped catchment models. Journal of Hydrology, 617 (Part C). 129097. ISSN 0022-1694
Abstract
Climate change is predicted to increase rainfall intensity in tropical regions. Convection permitting (CP) climate models have been developed to address deficiencies in conventional climate models that use parameterised convection. However, to date, precipitation projections from CP climate models have not been used in conjunction with hydrological models to explore potential impacts of explicit modelling of convective rainfall on river flows in the tropics. Here we apply the outputs of a continental scale CP climate model as inputs to lumped rainfall-runoff models in Africa for the first time. Applied to five catchments in the Lake Victoria Basin, we show that the CP climate model produces greater river flows than an equivalent model using parameterised convection in both the current and future (c. 2100) climate. However, the location of the catchments near to Lake Victoria results in limited changes in extreme rainfall and river flows relative to changes in mean rainfall and river flows. Application of CP model rainfall data from an area where rainfall extremes change more than the change in mean rainfall to the rainfall-runoff model does not result in significant changes in river flows. Instead, this is shown to be a result of the rainfall-runoff model structure and parameterisation, which we posit is due to large-scale storage in the catchments associated with wetland cover, that buffers the impact of rainfall extremes. Based on an assessment of hydrological attributes (wetland coverage, water table depth, topography, precipitation, evapotranspiration and river flow) using global-scale datasets for the catchments in this research, this buffering may be extensive across humid regions. Application of CP climate model data to lumped catchment models in these areas are unlikely to result in significant increases in extreme river flows relative to increases in mean flows.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 British Geological Survey © UKRI 2023. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | Climate change; River flows; Convection-permitting model; Lake Victoria |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Inst for Climate & Atmos Science (ICAS) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) NE/M02038X/1 NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) NE/M02038X/1 NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) NE/M017176/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 03 Feb 2023 15:06 |
Last Modified: | 07 Jun 2023 15:02 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2023.129097 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:195824 |